The Day the Owl Came
by Essy Lasaylan
Summary: The stories of how the other characters felt upon receiving their Hogwarts acceptance letter.
1. Hermione Granger

HERMIONE GRANGER  
  
She could hear things from her bedroom. The private part of the house wasn't really private at all. Her parents' room was above reception. If you sat in there you could hear the soft chatter of people discussing their bills, their appointments and the weather. Granny's room was above the surgery. All you heard in there was the slosh of running water and the occasional hums and whines of chair, polish and drill. Her own room was above the waiting room. Right now, she could hear Bobby Metcalfe telling his parents he didn't need a brace. He liked his teeth perfectly well crooked and why did they never listen to him? Hermione wished he'd shut up. She was trying to concentrate on her homework.  
  
***  
  
Eileen Bloom had been dyslexic before dyslexia was widely understood. Her teachers had thought she was backward and she'd had to fight with grim determination to get any sort of an education at all. After many sleepless nights of cramming and repeating things over and over - learning everything by heart because she didn't trust herself to read it properly - she'd been accepted to university to study medicine. Not as a doctor... not quite, but still more than any of her teachers had expected.  
  
She'd gone to university and met Kevin, who had worked right through his childhood to help support his mother after his father died. Kevin had struggled in a different way to get where he was and he understood all about sleepless nights. After graduation, they'd married, set up a practice together and had a beautiful baby whom they'd given a beautiful name from Shakespeare.  
  
They'd been meant to live happily ever after, but there'd been something wrong. Things would move without being touched. Toys would change shape or colour. They'd found her downstairs once, playing in the chair. It had been spinning and reclining even though it was unplugged and the door to the surgery had been carefully locked. They'd researched and discussed doctors and psychiatrists, but in the end, Kevin's mother had moved in and taken the unusual toddler under her wing. Little Hermione had learned the rules. She learned that the door to the surgery room was locked for a reason and shouldn't be opened whether you did it with your hands or with your head. Learned to carefully control her emotions so she wouldn't set things on fire or make them shrink. Learned to keep herself in check at all times, until she had eventually been pronounced a proper little lady.  
  
She'd learned the importance of hard work and study too; she'd learned that from her parents.  
  
***  
  
Hermione had finished her maths homework and was struggling through a French primer. Science and maths came most easily to her. Logic dictated whether the answer would be twelve or twenty, whether the goop in the test tube would turn red or green. Translation was more vague and therefore problematic. She didn't even take French yet, but she would soon be going to Grammar school to learn French, German and Latin, so she was determined to at least make a head start at French.  
  
In private (which she was, now that Bobby Metcalfe had finally stopped his whinging), Hermione was nervous about Grammar school. She'd passed the test to get in, but Hermione always passed tests. She'd been top of her class since her first day of school and she secretly worried about what it would be like at a new school full of other clever girls and new rules to learn.  
  
What she wanted more than anything, was to study at Mallory Towers. A dream only slightly flattened by the knowledge that it didn't exist. She wanted to go to school with Darrell Rivers and Alicia Johns and have midnight feasts and get into scrapes and play jokes on silly Gwendoline Lacey.  
  
Hermione gave her enormous collection of Enid Blyton books a longing look before turning her attention back to the French primer. She was too old for Mallory Towers stories now, anyway. She would go to St. James' and find her feet and be top of the class there, too. More to the point she would finish the exercises in the primer and present them to her parents at breakfast tomorrow to be marked. She would then eat her toast with dignity and maybe get her hair to stay flat and Granny Granger would tell her she was a "proper young lady."  
  
She was so busy daydreaming, she didn't even notice the owl until it soared through the open window, making her squeak with surprise. It deposited an impressive looking letter on her desk and she was pleased that she was able, even in her confusion, to identify it as an eagle owl before it flew out again.  
  
Hermione closed the window before turning her attention to the letter. Her eyes opened wider and wider as she read, until her eyebrows had disappeared completely under her bushy fringe. She needn't go to St. James' now. She'd be going to boarding school! A real-life Mallory Towers, where all the things that made her peculiar and solitary at her current school would make her successful and accepted! A whole new science to study, too. The science of magic!  
  
She gleefully put away the French primer and took the letter downstairs to show her parents and grandmother. She squashed the urge to bound down the stairs four at a time though.  
  
Proper ladies didn't run. 


	2. Petunia Evans

PETUNIA EVANS  
  
She doesn't hate her little sister. Her parents have often told her that she mustn't hate people. It's okay to hate things people do or the way they wear their hair or a category of people: like fascists, but you can't hate individual people, because it's wrong. Since Petunia is a good girl and generally does what her parents tell her, she doesn't hate her little sister, even if she sometimes secretly wants to.  
  
She always got on better with Iris, her elder sister. Iris was always so calm and placid. So ready to listen and so easy to understand. Wild, tomboy Lily is something else entirely. She even looks different. The older sisters are so alike: blonde, tall, blue-eyed, and compliant. Lily's green- eyed, redheaded wildness seems utterly alien. Lily often says that she's a changeling or a fairy princess and when she does you can almost believe her. The grown ups say she resembles one of their father's sisters, but Lily waves this away as unimportant. She's had dreams of a baby in a basket, placed on a doorstep in the dead of night and even her sceptical older sister knows that Lily's dreams are often true.  
  
Iris never had a nickname. She'd never seemed to need one. Petunia was Piano-Tuner, a relic of the days when Lily had been unable to pronounce 'Petunia' and had lisped out the nickname which the grown ups had proclaimed 'adorable' and universally adopted.  
  
Petunia doesn't hate her sister for the nickname, but she sometimes secretly wants to.  
  
Lily chose her own nickname: Tiger Lily, after the Indian princess from Peter Pan. This too, was loudly declaimed as 'adorable' by the grown ups, but as the baby of the family, most of Lily's activities got that verdict. Petunia was more often the recipient of 'nice' or 'very good', which, while well meant, weren't what she wanted to hear.  
  
Sometimes the grown ups thought she was jealous of Lily, but she wasn't... not exactly. It would be nice to be called 'adorable' and to win praise, but not Lily's way. Lily cheated. When they were told to wash up, Petunia would agonise over the basin until each dish and pan was immaculate for her 'very good'. Lily never seemed to do anything. She'd play with the soap bubbles and pretend the forks were ships, but when her parents came to check, the dishes would somehow all be cleaned, dried and put away. Then the grown ups would drop a kiss on her suds covered face and call her 'adorable'.  
  
It wasn't just chores. Things just seemed to happen for Lily in a way they never did for Petunia. She would mysteriously outgrow her dresses the moment she got tired of them. The book she was looking for would always be to hand, although she never organised her bookshelves like Petunia did. Then there was the terrible time they'd fought, not just argued, but really fought over the result of some silly game. It had seemed like the most important thing in the world at the time and they'd both been biting and pulling hair. Petunia had just raked Lily's arm with her nails when a shelf had flown from the wall and hit her in the back of her head. She'd bit her lip so hard she'd tasted blood and even Lily had seemed scared. Lily was often frightened afterwards by the things she did when she cheated. Petunia had ignored Lily for two days after that. She'd spent most of the time talking to Iris. Iris was a good listener.  
  
Then the owl came. It had swooped in through the French windows during lunch and deposited the letter right on top of Lily's food. Somehow Petunia had known what the letter would say, even before Lily read it out. Lily was going to be rewarded for cheating. Lily was going away and Petunia would be left behind again. She hadn't congratulated Lily when her parents did, so they'd told her that jealousy was an ugly emotion and ordered her to her room until she could be civil. She'd ignored them all and run out of the house, tears stinging her eyes. Not running away from home in a rage, dramatics like that were Lily's forte, Petunia just wanted to talk to Iris.  
  
She can remember when Lily was a baby and the three of them would play together in the garden. They'd make daisy chain crowns and necklaces and take turns pretending that they were Lily's mother. She remembers being happy then, before Iris left. They were the flower sisters: Iris, Petunia and Lily, and they would never be lonely because they would always have each other.  
  
Petunia is lonely now though. Her little sister grew up wrong and her big sister is younger than she is now. Petunia is nearly fifteen, but Iris will be eight years old forever. There aren't any flowers any more. Just an Indian princess, a cold stone with two dates on it and a girl called Piano- Tuner, crying to herself in a cemetery.  
  
She hadn't wanted a letter. Her parents had been wrong about that. Deep down she still knows that magic is cheating. But she wants a sister very badly. Somebody to play with and tell secrets to and laugh with and cry with, even if it's just spoilt, stupid, cheating little Lily. But the owl will take Lily away, just like the angels had taken Iris.  
  
"It shouldn't have been you," she whispers to the silent gravestone. "It should have been her."  
  
It's wrong to hate people, but hating groups of people is sometimes allowed. So Petunia sits on the grass beside her big sister's grave and begins to hate. 


End file.
